Sabah Select

Agar Aura is proud to present our very first Malaysian Borneo oil, and moreover the very first distillation ever conducted in the mountainous northern-most reaches of Borneo, "The Land Below The Wind": the Malaysian State of Sabah.

If you've compared our oils like Pencerahan to Berkilau... or Keemasan to Berjiwa, you will have realized that its not so much about the country, but rather the species of agarwood and the topography and climate where the trees grew that have the biggest impact on an oil's aroma.

Can you imagine if agarwood trees grew in the Canadian province of British Columbia or the American state of Washington? Sabah is the only place in the agarwood-producing countries of the world where the weather and topography are almost the same as those two regions of North America.
And you guessed it: these two factors have a huge impact on the aroma, as you will notice in our Sabah Select.

The species: Aquilaria Microcarpa agarwood, the queen of Borneo.
But unlike the glistening Microcarpa from Brunei and Sarawak (Malaysian west Borneo), the Sabah variety has a dull dusty gray appearance. Certainly not eye-candy, but when you place a chip on a live coal you're left dumb-founded by its tremendous beauty.
And that is also the case with the oil extracted from Sabah wood.

Crafted using a custom-made high-tech hybrid distillation system, and (of course) using our unique distillation techniques to pull out the richest extract of all the aromatic fractions from the wood, what you have here is the sweetest, most mouth-watering Borneo Microcarpa oud you can imagine.

Seriously... if agarwood grew in North America's Pacific Northwest, this is what it would smell like. Clean, serene, and with the sweetest woodiness you can imagine, Sabah Select boasts a scent profile that every Borneo oud yearns to have.
Its not about spicy richness, nor fruit assortments, and certainly not peppery or umami flavors.
She is not an Onyx like Indian oud, nor an Emerald like Papuan, nor is she a yellow Citrine like her peninsular south Malaysian cousin.
Sabah Select is the most brilliant blue Topaz you ever beheld.

Think mountaintop waterfalls. The piney clean air of a Canadian forest - but the pine aroma stripped of yellow terpenic notes to the point where the aroma turns blue.
Wild blueberries (verging on Kool-Aid blueberry punch, we kid you not), plenty of sky-blue chamomile, a hint of indigo hyacinth, lots of caramelized sugar, and buckets of sweet sweet honey.

Sabah is the second largest State in Malaysia, so the land mass it covers presents an astonishing range of oud scent profiles. We will be rolling out numerous Sabah oils later (there are 6 which are all ready even now), of various grades and scent profiles for you to explore.
But for our first Sabah oud we present to you Sabah Select, an oil coaxed out of agarwood from the Tawau region, as a tribute to the site of our Sabah distillery - Tawau.

The
Sabah Select is indeed like a cool breeze sweeping out
from an elevated
hillside to the senses. Most ouds of this caliber I
would use sparingly
to draw out the lifetime of the bottle, but this is an
oud that
seemingly exists to be worn and enjoyed in the present
moment. It makes
the world a brighter and calmer place.
Honestly, I liked the Jumanten a lot, but the Sabah
Select is simply
too nice. I just dealt with a plumbing disaster, and
even after the
workmen have gone and the place finally wiped down and
mopped up, not
at all a pleasant task, I feel like this was a good day.
If the Sabah
can do that, right after almost two weeks away on
business travel, I
should order several bottles of it, not just one!
M.I. (USA)

Sabah Select is also
hauntingly lovely. Piercingly clear, blue and green,
crystalline. It
reminds me a bit of Berkilau in terms of style.M.M. (Canada)

It's probably the best
one I've ever smelled from all yoursCustomer (USA)